G8 Summit Or Kindergarten Squabble?

The European Union has pledged a 20 percent emissions reduction by 2020, and has offered to raise it to 30 percent if other nations sign on. A U.N.-brokered agreement last December included a footnote referencing the need for cuts of between 25 percent and 40 percent. The United States, however, has not committed to a midterm goal, demanding that top developing countries like China also commit to reductions. Japan has called for emissions by industrialized countries to begin to fall in the next one or two decades, but it too has stopped short of setting a 2020 target.

Future summits may benefit from the help of a master group facilitator to help address some of the psychological barriers facing our leaders? This one very powerful cluster needs to get moving fast in the right direction.

I love that. “We’ll go 30% if others do!” I see what you mean by “kindergarten”. I wonder what they’d do if someone said, “okay, then – we’ll go for 110% by 2020, not only reduce by 100%, but actually absorb 10% more than we emit today.”

Probably they’d miss the next summit day and the day after have a note from their mother…

“Ours are the most fortunate generations that have ever lived [thanks to the huge increases in economic productivity brought about by our use of cheap and abundant fossil fuels]. Ours are the most fortunate generations that ever will. We inhabit the brief historical interlude between ecological constraint and ecological catastrophe.

I don’t have to remind you of the two forces which are converging on our lives. We are faced with an impending shortage of the source of energy which is hardest to replace – liquid fossil fuels. And we are faced with the environmental consequences of the fossil fuel burning which has permitted us to be standing here now. The structure, the complexity, the diversity of our lives, everything we know, everything that we have taken for granted, that looked solid and non-negotiable, suddenly looks contingent. All this is a great tottering pile balanced on a ball, a ball that is about to start rolling downhill.”

If Monbiot is correct, or even close, who among the leaders of the G8 (or any other countries) want to stand up and be the messenger who tells his/her people that the good economic times may be, or soon will be, in the past?

Leadership is a quality rarely found in politicians. It sometimes happens. US presidents need to show off a certain sense of leadership to get elected, so there’s one source. But the same can not be said for the secretaries of state. It would be merely a coincident if they would actually make a stand for something.

I think the main problem nowadays is that most governments see themselves only as managers of the economy, while they happily take GDP as a measure of their performance, just like corporations do with profits. This has nothing to do with leadership.

How many people at the top currently can say clearly where they want their countries to go? Most are only busy with solving “issues”.

That topic reminds me from the discussion about historical leadership during WWII on Talk Climate Change.

I agree with you all, we lack serious leadership. We have a huge problem and we need men and women who actually lead their countries to the victory, ie. toward a full climate change mitigation and environmental protection.

The decisions that are to be taken are not easy ones, and let’s face, not deciding the right things right now would put us all in a much more serious situation. It is time that the leaders we have understand that.

Perhaps the Grenelle in France will set an example, if we actually succeed in the endeavor. The laws are to be ” launched ” this summer. Hope it will work.

I am “optimistic” in one or two senses and “concerned” in another. Regarding whether there are huge sources of energy that we can utilize, I’m optimistic that there are. (The sun and the wind and the oceans are VERY big things.) And, regarding technologies, we already have many of the technologies needed to gain energy from these sources. (This doesn’t mean that we don’t need alot more R&D to perfect them, develop them better, and do related things.)

But, my big concerns involve the question of will and (basically) intelligence and the willingness to change.

If we can muster the will and intelligence to change, the rest can work out well. For example, (as more and more people are starting to point out), huge numbers of jobs will be created in order to shift our energy sources and infrastructure. If we do things right, the shift can be a net plus economically (and a big one) rather than an economy killer.

(Of course, we will still need to address sustainability in a broader sense, including population.)

We aren’t lacking powerful energy sources, nor are we lacking technological ability, nor are we facing a situation where jobs will dry up. We are lacking will and, yes, visionary and intelligent leadership. We need to wake our leaders up, or quickly replace them. (Of course, at least some of that will happen soon, hopefully.)

Yesterday, we landed a machine on Mars. That’s NOT an easy task, technologically speaking. We can address our energy problem. We just need to decide to do so. And, we need to elect people who will do so, smartly.

Much of this gets back to the social dynamic that Marguerite has been discussing.

Thanks Edouard, for bringing up the Grenelle. I did blog about it when it was developed. It seemed like the perfect plan. Of course, the proof will be all in the execution. It would make me so proud to be French!

In the end, it may be that businesses and citizen movements are our best chances. For those of you not aware of it, here is a link to the Rocky Mountain Institute: